How to (or not to) port a number in India

Working for a popular telecom service provider over the last two years, and specifically working for porting changes, I thought porting or MNP (as they call it here), would be an easy process. But oh boy, how wrong I was. Hence, here goes the story, the story of my battle which lasted for eleven days (FYI the war of Mahabharata lasted for eighteen days).

The whole process was triggered when Vodafone, my previous Service Provider, deducted about 200 bucks from my pre-paid account without giving me any reason, and later giving me stupid reasons like:

• Your data pack validity expired and hence the balance has gone to reserve. Please disable data connection and restart phone, your balance will be back. (I had a data pack, and I did as instructed, it did not work, as expected) 
• You have used data connection without data pack and hence all your balance has gone. (You mean to say I used 200 rupees worth of 2G data in 2 hours, where half of the time there is no connection!) 
• There is a technical problem, please check after 1 hour. (Haha, we all know what that means, you do not have a clue what is wrong!)

After all these, I thought I have had enough of Vodafone and asked them to give me the detail breakup of the charges, which of course they could not, and so I decided to move on.

The best choice was Airtel (appeared at that time), little did I knew what would be in store for me at Airtel. So, here is a step by step procedure of how to achieve number porting successfully:

1. SMS PORT your number to 1900:The easiest step of the whole process. You will get a Unique Porting Code which will be valid till some date as mentioned in the reply message.
2. Grab a porting SIM:One of the toughest jobs to do. I roamed around for two days. All retailers said there are problems in porting hence they do not keep porting SIMs. How naïve of me to not listen to them. I thought, Telenor does porting in one day, can’t they do it in 7 days! And finally I got the SIM at a small shop in Begur and hence started the ordeal.
3. Wait for 7 days: Relatively easy part. After that you get an SMS about the time of your porting, and you see the phone showing no signal after that time, when you are supposed to insert the new SIM. I did exactly and tried making a call, which directly went to some Airtel call centre, and the guy verified my details and told me not to make any calls till morning. Anyway, I could not have since this is a pre-paid connection, and there was no balance in my account.
4. Call here and there: Now starts the real battle. Your account will be in a limbo state, you cannot recharge, hence you cannot make a call. And since getting real support also costs now, you cannot talk to a real person by dialing 121. What do you do then? You go to some random Airtel retailer shop (or the shop you got the SIM) and ask for help. Then they connect you to 198, the complaint section of Airtel. Then you tell your story, and first thing they say is “Please wait for seven days”. It is first time, so you believe him/her.
5. Wait for seven days: You cannot call for these seven days, since you do not have balance and you cannot recharge. Your number shows “not a Airtel Number” on online recharge, and recharge by the retailer fails by just saying “not successful”. And then your ex-boyfriend calls just when you were recharging, and you give away the money even without checking the “failed” message, and then repent about why did you have to pick that call!
6. Call here and there: If you have notices, this is same as 4^th step, that is what you do when it does not work after “seven” days. You call 198 again and again until your number is blocked there, and then you call from your friend’s mobile who has a Airtel connection. And mind you, all these while you have incoming, both SMS and voice, so, you should not complain much. And then you listen to all these options:
• Please recharge with Rs. 4/- from the same retailer where you got your SIM. (Very clever ploy, they know you have other work and hence can’t be sitting all day at the retailer shop.)
• Please recharge with Rs. 201/- (Does not work, I have already told it was failing both online and at the retailer)
• Please talk to my supervisor. (We all know that “supervisor” is the guy sitting beside you, Sweety!)
• Please wait for 48 hours. (At this point I ask “Why someone takes a mobile connection?” No answer, as expected)
7. Try to make noise: Go online and make noise. Check all consumer complaints forum and make online complaint, make as much noise as you can. While doing that I stumbled upon this Facebook page Airtel Presence https://www.facebook.com/bhartiairtelltd and I left a wall post as well as a message. Though my wall post was deleted, they replied to my message that they are sorry for the inconvenience and they will look into it. Let a day or two pass, and nothing happens, then start commenting on all their pictures. And then a mysterious savior (appointed by Airtel Presence) calls you, “I will look into it!” and you fall in love with him/her!
8. Your account is valid now but you cannot recharge: All the savior does is fix half of your problem, so now your number shows as a Airtel number online, but still you cannot recharge. Now your money gets deducted from your bank account but the recharge fails. And then you ask your boyfriend to do a “chhota” recharge from a retailer and it still fails. What do you do now? Keep making noise. This is when I logged in here https://prepaidweb.airtelworld.com/PSC_Web/PSCloginAction (you have to use your Airtel number, before the savior came into the battle, here it would have showed “Please enter a valid Airtel number”) and raised a service request. Finally I got a request number of all my complaints.
9. Savior saves the day: Your savior calls again and you calmly explain the problem and he/she promises you to look into it. And then after a few minutes you get an SMS saying the problem is solved. And now you try to recharge online and it is success and you can’t believe it, and you check the balance thrice, and then you send the first SMS to your boyfriend, and make the first call to your mom, and shout “Yay!” as if you won a great battle. Finally you thank your savior and promise that you will never call him/her back, even for a date.
10. Thank God: Don’t forget to thank God, after all it was all His doing. Otherwise how would you come to know who cares about you. Call and text back to only those people who called or texted you in this period, they are your real friends J

A software engineers POV of the problem:

• All service providers want to reduce pre-paid connections and migrate you to post-paid since post-paid customers are like the farm cows, most beneficial!
• That is why it is very easy to port to post-paid. I myself got call two times from Airtel Chennai asking if I would like to make my connection to post-paid, which I politely declined.
• Airtel’s Order Value chain was surely not be working properly, the defect might have been in the order capture system, or in the back-end.
• The SIM was activated, but the subscription was not created properly with my details. Hence, my number was being declared as a non Airtel number.
• The savior fixed this, but then he forgot to send those details to billing systems, hence my billing account was not created. As a result, recharges were failing, if there is no account, you cannot transfer money into it, can you?
• Finally, the account was created and connected to the subscription, and hence I could recharge  and make calls, and send sms, and recharge for 3G data.

Truly speaking, when I received that porting SIM, I had no idea I would write a whole blog for it!

PS: Vodafone would have tried to call me and persuade me not to port out, but given the discussions I had before, they decided not to.